Deadline for Apprentice Audition is here!

So you finished the conservatory at Second City or maybe your 5B show at iO came to a close. What now? If you live in Chicago, the city is rich with opportunities to get more experience and become a better improvisor. You could create an independent team, audition for the incubator program at the Playground or get involved in the team systems at several other theaters. What makes the Apprentice Program at Under The Gun Theater different?

It’s not a team system

Getting cast on an improv team can be a great experience, but it’s not always wonderful. It’s sometimes hard to get organized and keep a group of people committed to a regular rehearsal schedule. Personality conflicts can sometime sabotage a team and even if it does work well, it’s common to lose some of your best players to better opportunities. In short, your personal experience on an improv team is greatly affected by which team your assigned to and how well that team works together.

Instead, it’s an ensemble

At Under The Gun Theater, we like having an ensemble approach instead. Thats our ensemble in the picture above. With a larger group of performers working together, the overall ensemble is more robust than a team. If individuals end up leaving, the overall health of the ensemble isn’t affected as much. If there are personality conflicts, they tend to not be as acute, since you are working with a larger overall number of people.

So that’s what we’ve done with our educational approach. We group the members of the Apprentice Program into larger ensembles who rotate through the performances. We assign multiple coaches to an ensemble so that they can get a greater perspective than you can get from just 1 teacher. And we challenge our ensembles with multiple improv forms, which develop different skills.